Seasons of War

him, though the man’s face remained turned away. Otah wondered, not for the first time, what brokering this agreement had cost Issandra Dasin.
    He glanced at the stairs down which her daughter had vanished, and then back, his hands shifting into a pose that made an implicit offer. Issandra raised an eyebrow, a half-smile making a dimple in one cheek. Otah tugged at his robes, straightening the lines, and stepped carefully down from the dais. The girl Ana would be his daughter too, soon enough. If her true mother and father weren’t placed to speak with her in her distress, perhaps it was time that Otah did.
    Below decks, the Galtic ship was as cramped and close and ripe with the scent of tightly quartered humanity as any ship Otah had sailed with. Under normal circumstances, the deck now peopled with the guests of the Dasin family would have given room to a full watch of sailors. Instead, most were lurking in the tiny rooms, waiting for the songs to end and their own turn with fresh air to come. Still, Otah, Emperor of the Khaiem, found a way cleared for him, conversations stopping when he came in view. He made his way forward, squinting into the darkness for a glimpse of the rabbit-faced girl.
    Galtic design divided the cargo hold in sections, and it was in one of these dark chambers that he heard the girl’s voice. Crates and boxes loomed above him to either side, the binding ropes creaking gently with the rolling ship. Rats chattered and complained. And there, hunched over as if she were protecting something pressed to her belly, sat Ana Dasin.
    ‘Excuse me,’ Otah said. ‘I don’t mean to intrude, but . . . may I sit?’
    Ana looked up at him. Her dark eyes shone in the dim light. Her nod was so faint it might almost have been the movement of the ship. Otah stepped carefully over the rough board, hitched his robes up to his shins, and sat at the girl’s side. They were silent. Above them, the singers struck a complex rhythm, like jugglers tossing pins between them. Otah sighed.
    ‘I know this isn’t easy for you,’ he said.
    ‘What isn’t, Most High?’
    ‘Otah. Please, my name is Otah. You can call me that. I mean all of this. Being uprooted, married off to a man you’ve never met in a city you’ve never been to.’
    ‘It’s what’s expected of me,’ she said.
    ‘Yes, I know, but . . . it isn’t really fair.’
    ‘No,’ she said, her voice suddenly hard. ‘It isn’t.’
    Otah clasped his hands, fingers laced together.
    ‘He isn’t a bad man, my son,’ Otah said. ‘He’s clever and he’s strong, and he cares about people. He feels deeply. He’s probably a better man than I was at his age.’
    ‘Forgive me, Most High,’ Ana Dasin said. ‘I don’t know what you want me to say.’
    ‘Nothing. Nothing in particular. Only know that this life that we’ve forced on you . . . it might have some redeeming qualities. The gods all know the life I’ve had wasn’t the one I expected, either. We do what we have to do. In my ways, I’m as constrained by it as you are.’
    She looked at him as if he were speaking a language she hadn’t heard before. Otah shook his head.
    ‘It’s nothing, Ana-cha,’ he said. ‘Only know that I know how hard this time is, and it will get better. If you allow room for it, this new life might even surprise you.’
    The girl was quiet for a moment, her brow furrowed. She shook her head.
    ‘Thank you?’ she said.
    Otah chuckled ruefully.
    ‘I’m not doing a particularly good job of this, am I?’ he said.
    ‘I don’t know,’ Ana Dasin said after a pause. Her tone carried the shielded contempt of an adolescent for her elders. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing.’
    Making his way back through the crowded belly of the ship, Otah wondered what he had thought he would say to a Galtic girl who had seen forty-five fewer summers than himself. He had expected to offer some kind of wisdom, some variety of comfort, and instead it had been like trying to hold a conversation with a cat. Who would have thought a man could be as old as he was, wield the power of empire, and still be so naïve as to think his heart would be explicable to an eighteen-year-old girl?
    And, of course, as he reached the plank stairway that led up, he found what he wished he had said. He should have said that he knew what courage it took to face sacrifice. He should have said that he knew her suffering was real, and that it was in a noble cause. It made them alike, the Emperor and